A Man of Influence

Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was a renowned novelist, pacifist, vegetarian, and mystic whom you've likely never heard of unless you are an aficionado of early 20th-century Nobel Prize winners. Nevertheless, despite Rolland's marked absence from today's zeitgeist, he brushed elbows and had close friendships with an impressive list of notables from all walks of life. For example, he was a pen pal with conductor Richard Strauss and psychologist Sigmund Freud, was named as the dedicatee of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, wrote a book on Mahatma Gandhi and then met the Indian leader, and attempted to intervene with Josef Stalin on behalf of his activist friends who opposed the dictator.

Ultimately, perhaps Rolland's star has waned in our time because of that last association: despite Rolland being characterized as a moral compass for Western culture both during and between World War I and World War II, his staunch adulation of Stalin well through the Second World War earned him rebuke and criticism from his peers.

Here at Rauner, we have a small but interesting collection of photographs taken of Rolland and various individuals, including Maxim Gorky and Mahatma Gandhi. To look through them, come to Special Collections and ask for Iconography 1505.

New Exhibit: "Histories Unheard"

This summer we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Dartmouth Library’s Historical Accountability Student Research Program (HASRP). For the last five years, the program has been sponsored by the Provost’s Office under the auspices of the campus-wide Inclusive Excellence initiative. Born in the summer of 2018, the program initially provided for three competitive and fully funded fellowships, with an additional fourth fellowship funded every year through the generosity of the Sphinx Foundation. To date, the program has supported twenty undergraduate fellows and numerous interns, all of whom have conducted independent archival research related to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in Dartmouth College’s past.

Our innovative and dynamic program offers an open-ended scope for project topics. The program’s goal is not to create a definitive report or scholarly publication but instead to provide student researchers with hands-on experience conducting archival research and to keep the dialogue about historical accountability alive and moving forward. It is an ongoing conversation about our institution’s historical accountability, and not a conclusion or referendum.

So, although the program has been a great success so far, there is still much work to be done. Thanks to guaranteed funding from Dartmouth’s Office for Institutional Diversity and Equity, the Library will continue to provide opportunities for students to practice archival research skills while blazing trails into IDE issues for future researchers and scholars. Please celebrate the success of the program with us by exploring this exhibit that highlights the projects and research of select interns and fellows from the first five years of its existence.

This exhibit was curated by Val Werner '21, Historical Accountability Student Research Program Coordinator, and Morgan Swan, the Special Collections Librarian for Teaching and Scholarly Engagement. The poster was designed by Samantha Milnes, Collection Management Assistant at Rauner Special Collections Library. The exhibit will be on display in Rauner Special Collections Library's Class of 1965 Galleries from June 19, 2023, until September 15, 2023. Learn more by visiting the exhibit website.

Not THAT Josiah Bartlet

Dartmouth counts many famous people connected to the school. For the Fourth of July this year, we feature Josiah Bartlett... no, not the fictional one "t" President Bartlet on West Wing who taught economics here, but his actual namesake, two "tt" Josiah Bartlett, first Governor of the State of New Hampshire, the state's delegate to the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence. A successful doctor, he was also a trustee of Dartmouth and was awarded an honorary degree at the 1790 graduation where he spoke.

We have a wonderful stash of letters in his papers (MS-181) that includes this gem perfect for the day. Writing to Bartlett from Exeter in August, 1776, Nathaniel Folsom enthuses:

The Declaration is well receivd here, has been duely published etc. As to myself and some of my particular friends with whom I have the happiness to agree in almost every publick measure it was extremely agreeable--it will (I doubt not) have a happy tendency to unite us in the present glorious struggle for by it many of the objections of wavering (tho' perhaps otherwise well disposed) persons are entirely answered--In short, it is the first principle of every virtuous man to keep a conscience void of offense toward God & man, it is the second thing he has in view to make it appear to the World. By the Declaration you make evident to the World that you are neither ashamed to own the Cause of Liberty nor afraid to defend it, and I doubt not it will be defended even against the Ultimo Ratio Regis.

The last line a reference to the news of most of the remainder of the letter which was almost exclusively concerned with the state of the troops, the building of a new fort and equipping a powder mill. We will be closed for the Fourth, but come in this week and look over Bartlett's communications as the country formed.

Elevating the Art of Wood Engraving

What is wood engraving exactly? It's a method of illustration printed from blocks of wood where the image has been carved into the end grain. Unlike other wood cuts, which are made by carving along the grain, the benefit of engraving is its hardness and durability. An engraved wood block could be used to print images in far more detail and would deteriorate far more slowly, even when applied in a printing press alongside metal type.

It wasn't until the 18th century that this technique was really embraced for illustration. It had previously been utilized to a degree but, to quote one account, "it can scarcely be said to have existed, except in its ruder forms. Tasteless emblematical ornaments and tail-pieces, diagrams and rough designs for magazines, illustrations of an elementary character for a few books." An English artist named Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) was responsible for the turnabout. Deeply in love with nature and with making art, a fourteen-year-old Bewick was apprenticed to the engraver Ralph Beilby, whose business was making such miscellanies as described above. He excelled at the work and, among the rest, began to take on commissions for children's books. With his own practice, he continued to develop his technique and eventually began writing his own books and illustrating them with wood engravings with a "singular technical dexterity."

Today's item is an 1807 edition of A General History of Quadrupeds, Bewick's first original text. A natural history book aimed at children, the General History is both informative and humorous. One description states that the porcupine, though "denied the privilege of making offensive war, it is sufficiently armed to resist the attacks of animals much more powerful than itself." Meanwhile, the zebra is "one of the most beautiful, and also one of the wildest and most untameable animals in nature... its liberty has heretofore remained uncontrouled." The book was massively successful with its intended audience, as well as with adult readers.

To see a charming book that helped kicked off wood engraving as a serious art form, ask for A General History of Quadrupeds, Illus B468be.

Fan Mail

Slipped into our copy of Frederick Douglass' My Bondage and My Freedom (New York and Auburn, 1855) is a memento of the author's fame. It's a letter, dated May 1, 1856, addressed to Passmore Williamson. Williamson was an abolitionist lawyer from Philadelphia. In 1855, he was charged under the Fugitive Slave Act for assisting a woman and her two sons escape from their enslavement. He served a 100-day jail term for contempt of court and his case brought renewed energy to the abolitionist movement and created a flurry of news coverage.

Less than five months after he was freed from jail, Williamson wrote to Frederick Douglass requesting his autograph for a friend. Douglass replied with a short, but passionate letter:

Passmore Williamson Esq. Please tender my thanks to your friend, the gentleman who honors me by wishing an Autograph letter from me. I comply with your request with very great pleasure--and all the more since I have again glanced at the Authentic history of the prosecution and persecution to which you have been subjected by the aggression and murderous Spirit of American Slavery.

On the back of the letter is a brief postscript: "This note was forgotten after writing it and therefore the delay in sending it--F. D."

First, we love the idea of Douglass forgetting the mail on his desk--busy as he was. It makes him even more human and real.

But what gets us is that he was being pursued by autograph hounds who used the leverage of their famous friends to get a note to the great man. Our copy of the book was presumably owned by the unnamed person Passmore Williamson passed this letter onto. The letter has been safely tucked inside for nearly 170 years.

Celebrate Juneteenth by coming in and taking a look. Ask for Rare E499 .D738 1855.

Splintered Socialism

Most of us, when we think of William Morris (if we think of him at all), think of interior decorations associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th century. If we're more bibliophilic than most, we might even reflect fondly on Morris' founding of the Kelmscott Press and the printed wonders that issued forth from Hammersmith during the 1890s. In addition to his creative output, however, Morris was also a fervent activist on behalf of British socialism, a fledgling political movement that began in 1881 in England with only a hundred or so members. After a schism in the Socialist Democratic Foundation, the only socialist party at the time, Morris and over half of the executive council left to create their own organization in 1885 called the Socialist League.

One of their first acts as a splinter group was to spell out their beliefs. In "The Manifesto of the Socialist League", printed in 1885, William Morris and E. Belfort Bax laid out their political philosophy. Unlike their adversaries in the Socialist Democratic Foundation, the members of the Socialist League felt that all of the prevailing political systems of the age had been tried and found failures "in dealing with the real evils of life." Instead, the League sought complete revolutionary socialism, a rebuilding and redistribution of the means of production from the ground up.

In addition to Morris and Bax, the newly formed league boasted such luminary founding members as Eleanor Marx (daughter of that Karl Marx) and artist Walter Crane, whose artwork is featured on the cover of the group's manifesto. Perhaps somewhat predictably, the League's emphasis on the corrupt

nature of current government attracted a significant number of anarchists. It also, however, had become a haven for socialists who had been turned off by the extremist and nationalistic approach to politics espoused by the SDF, but who still envisioned the possibility of governmental reform. By 1889, the anarchist contingent had gained control of the League. Morris, Marx, and many others left the group, either to form another smaller socialist group or to return to the SDF.

Here in Special Collections, we have an uncut version of the 16-page manifesto, which occupies a single sheet of paper. Our favorite section is from the first note that follows the body of the text; Morris states that physicians should be counted among the working class. Despite their skilled training, they (like literary authors) belong to the "intellectual proletariat" and "have nothing to lose and everything to gain from a social revolution." To see our copy of the manifesto and reflect upon how some things have changed and some things may never change, come to Rauner and ask for Rare HX11 .S63 M26 1885.

An Almanac for America

Almanacs have been in existence since at least the second millennium BCE; their annual predictions of weather and other calendar-related natural phenomena were vital tools used by numerous professions, including farmers, sailors, and astronomers. When Europeans began to settle on the American continent in large numbers, the colonists needed almanacs that were aligned for to their particular area of the world.

The first American almanac for New England was printed in 1639 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the second document printed in the English colonies in America. In the mid-1700s, an almanac published by Nathaniel Ames became the the most popular brand for nearly fifty years. A medical doctor by trade, Ames was known as a bit of a renaissance man as well as an eccentric. In 1725, when Ames was just seventeen, he published the first edition of his almanac; after his death in 1764, his son continued publishing the almanac for another ten years.

One of the utilitarian modifications that 18th-century colonists made to their almanacs was to interleave blank pages between the printed pages. On those sheets, they would record all sorts of information that was relevant not only to the weather but also to their immediate lived experience, including deaths, births, marriages, and other community occurrences. Here in Special Collections, we have a run of Ames almanacs from 1741 until 1762. Nearly every single printed page is interleaved with a previously blank one that now contains copious notes about the actual weather, deaths, births, and other goings-ons. We don't know who the original owner was, but he was clearly a resident of Portsmouth, NH: he mentions among other things the death of the minister of Portsmouth's South Church, Rev. William Shurtleff III, on May 9, 1747.

To journey back in time and space through the eyes of a colonial New Englander, come to Rauner and ask to see Rare AY53 .A8.